RICHLAND, Wash. –
Three scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will receive an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy, including funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for five-year research grants. All three researchers will receive grants for at least $500,000 a year to cover year-round salary plus research expenses.

The three PNNL researchers receiving this award and their grant titles are:

As part of the DOE's new Early Career Research Program, this new effort is designed to bolster the nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

To be eligible for an award, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant professor at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory, who received a Ph.D. within the past ten years.

Awardees were selected from a pool of 1,750 university- and national laboratory-based applicants. Selection was based on peer review by outside scientific experts.

UPDATE: After this news release was issued, DOE also presented an Early Career Research Award to PNNL bioanalytical chemist Wei-Jun Qian. His winning research project is titled "Spatial and Temporal Proteomics for Characterizing Protein Dynamics and Posttranslational Modifications" and is being funded by DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Uljana Mayer could not take advantage of her award.

Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory address many of America's most pressing issues in energy, the environment and national security through advances in basic and applied science. Founded in 1965, PNNL employs 4,300 staff and has an annual budget of more than $1 billion. It is managed by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. As the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information on PNNL, visit the PNNL News Center, or follow PNNL on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.